Originally Posted by
maximus83
Agree, and my own experience has borne that out. After h.s. in which I lifted and played 3 sports, life got busy and I tried running. It seemed to have very limited health benefit, although I'm an outdoors person and it just gives a huge mental lift to go out running--even in the rain in the PNW. For me, the run was always one of the high points of my day and it was fun to push yourself. Then I started to accumulate injuries from age and overuse, and nothing--not the R.I.C.E. regimen, not better shoes or insoles, not fancy exercises--would prevent it. Guess that God didn't build me to be a marathon guy. Plantar fasciitis (multiple bouts). Right knee pain. Shin splints. Lower right back pain. Enough already!
I finally wised up, about 7 years ago I did some homework and switched to a program that might differ in the details, but follows the same principles that Will suggests. In short: prioritize strength training, and some kind of H.I.I.T training, over 'pure cardio' training by which I mean something like steady state running or just churning away endlessly at the same rate on a stationary bike or other contraption.
Even if you're aging, you don't have to set out to be the hulk. Even light resistance training can help. If having back and other issues, you'll be amazed how a good physical therapist can set you up with some resistance training that will help improve things. For instance, I could believe how weak I was in the hip muscles despite lifting. And that was affecting my back. As for H.I.I.T, you can get away with even using some of the things you know, but you just have to do it differently. For instance I have a stationary bike for bad weather days. But instead of just churning away at the same speed for 30 minutes, I do maybe a 15-20 minute workout where I go at about 80-90% of max effort for short bursts, like 30 seconds, then drop back to a moderate pace to recover for maybe 60 seconds, and repeat. You can do the same types of things with running, if you like running. The catch for me, trying to do H.I.I.T with running, was that I was doing on pavement (not a lot of choice, I live in an urban area) and that brought back all the injuries related to pounding the pavement. So I'm pretty much done with running.
Spot on Will. Thanks for these informative posts!
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